January 7, 2008

king corn

I am slowly working my way through Omnivore's Dilemma. Not that it is a hard read (rather I was just a bit overloaded with holiday preparations and celebrations). I'm still on the section about corn. It really is fascinating to learn how corn is in everything (and not just food!) and what the farming of corn is all about (from an economic and environmental standpoint).

I was excited to see there is a new movie that is about this. It is called, "King Corn". You can see a trailer for it here. The Austin Chronicle says the film is ". . .as relevant as Super Size Me and as important as An Inconvenient Truth."

Here is the synopsis:

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm.